I once took a group of young people foraging for mushrooms in the Willamette valley on a farm that had loads of these newts. I warned every body not to touch them.
After preparing dinner, one girl got very ill, as did I, while other people who ate the dinner were fine. I was so worried I'd mis-identified some mushrooms.
But turns out she had handled one of these newts and the bacteria had transferred to the mushrooms she picked. I contacted it from washing the mushrooms. I threw up several times that night.
In hindsight, had we not washed the mushrooms as thoroughly as we did, things could have gone much worse.
Eating wild mushrooms has got to have the worst cost/benefit ratio outside of wingsuiting or recreational bear wrestling. In exchange for hours of study and a significant risk of death you get fifty to a hundred calories of food. Probably made sense in the tenth century when the average person was one bad harvest away from starvation, but it seems harder to justify today.
Where I live mushrooms are by far the most abundant wild food. It's good exercise, very enjoyable "work", and they taste really really good with a huge variety of flavors.
Leafy greens also have very low calories per pound. We eat them for the nutrients not for the calories. Because of mushrooms and wild greens, I buy very little vegetables, all I need is relatively cheap (per calorie) foods to go with the wild stuff.
There is also risk of food poisoning with food from restaurants or the store.. not to mention the chronic poisoning of eating food grown with excessive pesticides etc.
For the most part the abundant edible mushrooms look very different from the dangerous ones. But yes you do need to know ID thoroughly if you go for certain species.
That said not everyone lives where edible mushrooms are abundant, I'm not trying to suggest everyone should do it.
Not even that much. A couple of cups of mushrooms -- a generous helping as a side dish -- has around 30 calories.
All the significant calories comes from the oil or butter they're cooked in.
I'm not sure it was ever about avoiding starvation, but rather just a different flavor to eat sometimes. When you're always eating the same local ingredients, food can get boring pretty quick. It's the same appeal of spices -- you got a new flavor!
Mushrooms add to the umami flavour, before salt was easily accessible this was probably your best bet for easy flavour enhansement
Salt is more fundamental for the body than just flavoring. I'd hesitate even to call it a spice. That said, umami ingredients like mushrooms and seaweed are certainly used together with salt.
Salt has always been freely available from the ocean, which I believe most people lived pretty close to.
MSG is like $0.30/kg.
I don't think they had MSG before salt
There's a long history of glutamate containing food and food products being used in place of salt across the world, before it was first chemically isolated.
Who cares? We don't live "before salt". Human use of salt _predates writing_ by about 3000 years.
You wouldn't choose to do manual typesetting (or copying books by hand!!!) today either versus alternatives.
If you're _just_ looking to add umami flavor to a dish today, you'd be crazy to pick foraging for wild mushrooms over Aji no Moto.
Well you were replying to a comment about why we foraged for them before salt broski. Doesn't really make sense to bring up the price of something that wasn't isolated then.
I'm skeptical of any food that humans only started eating since the industrial revolution, including those that are derivatives of or isolated compounds of real food. Mostly the effects on our bodies are not well studied. I haven't specifically read studies on msg though.
I mean, foods like soy sauce and yogurt and sauerkraut predate industrialization, but are very processed. I wouldn't worry too much about MSG in particular, since it is also mostly made by fermentation:
How much studying of food do you think was happening before the industrial revolution?
> Human use of salt _predates writing_ by about 3000 years.
That looks like... an intensely conservative estimate. Deer use salt.
> It's the same appeal of spices -- you got a new flavor!
That's not the appeal of spices. People don't stop using the spices they like in quest of newer, worse-tasting ones. By far the most common case when a person is eating spices is that there's nothing new about the flavor.
Could also be used to mask stale or spoiled foods that if cooked enough, wont kil you and still contains nutrition. Nothing goes to waste. Another could be preservation as is the case for salt.
Salt is much simpler than that. It's a vital nutrient and if you don't eat enough of it, you'll die. It's useful for preservation, sure, but you're not eating it because you couldn't find fresh food. You're eating it because it's salt.
Many spices, as well as actual oil extracted from actual snakes by actual healers, and mushrooms as well, gained reputations in antiquity as medicinal and/or beneficial to health in some way.
And this often fueled increased trade and increased cultivation volumes and increased prices and tariffs and wars and cruel laws. In antiquity.
And often, the actual medicinal benefits became overhyped, and crept from their scope, and each nation's crown jewel of a spice became a miracle cure-all, and cue the trade wars and sword-wielding knights defending their spice.
Basically the "Snake Oil Salesmen" of the Wild West were white hucksters who diluted the actual snake oil down so much, or didn't bother adding any in the first place, then sold the elixirs on Main Street between the saloon and the whorehouse. So the Native Americans were nonplussed that their shamanistic remedies had been subverted as a trope of quacks and hoaxers.
Most of all, these spices and mushrooms have been gradually enshittified, perhaps literally, and many of them are a shadow of their former selves, bred for mass-production. And Americans sit there and dust our burger and fries with gray sand that doesn't even taste like black pepper anymore. Not to mention the salt that's been refined until there's nothing but sodium in it.
Perhaps mushrooms are the least likely food to be enshittified or deliberately commercialized, except for about 4 types in the grocery stores. From what I've learned about mushroom foraging, it's never worth it; just go buy mushrooms in the store, I mean for crying out loud. The risk is too great, and aficionados can claim "easy identification" all they want, but "easy" is relative and not for you to judge, because there's a fine line between tasty and fatal.
Acccording to America's poisen center these are the numbers:
Calls to poisen control concerning mushrooms: 8,294 Of those calls, 4862 were of unknown origin, only like 3-400 are confirmed dangerous wild grown mushrooms, 2k+ are psylocibin. 3-400 is probably <1% of the amount of people who forage, so its a lot safer than driving a car I'm guessing.
(This was a quick scan)
https://piper.filecamp.com/uniq/dPhtQdu6eCQnIQ5R.pdf [page 174-175]
Meanwhile 48 million Americans get some kind of food poisoning each year. Eating food is dangerous!
I've eaten many hundreds of pounds of wild mushrooms in the last eight years and have not had any food poisoning at all.
To be honest, I will probably still pass. Mushrooms kinda freak me out on a biological level anyways. What is crazy to me is how people find certain things scary or risky but they'll literally strap themselves inside a metal box on wheels that has uses a controlled explosion produced with highly carcinogenic toxic chemicals, that has hundreds of parts that can fail, it can slam into the other contraption next you tear you in half, all so they don't have to ride a bike or walk for an extra twenty minutes..
I can't remember who said it originally, but it amuses me to no end that the only reason our society works as well as it does is a mutual agreement to follow some lines and not play bumper cars
Honestly it's not hours of study. You identify the one mushroom that you're going foraging for, and then you need to know the ones that look like it so that you don't get those by mistake. It's pretty simple if you know what you're doing. Ie: Chantrelles have a symbiotic relationship with Douglas Fir trees, so you're only going to find them around Douglas firs.
> Chantrelles have a symbiotic relationship with Douglas Fir trees, so you're only going to find them around Douglas firs
I'm not sure that's true, I know that we had Cantharellus cibarius ("golden chanterelle") growing up everywhere in the woods, but I don't think the Douglas fir even exists there, never heard that name before. The forest was mostly oak I think.
Oh come on - Making cost benefit analysis of foraging and eating wild mushrooms into a matter of calories is wild.
The calorific value of a meal is one of the least important aspects - you might as well complain that the mushrooms don’t come in sufficiently varied colours to make it worthwhile.
It’s not about the calories. It’s about the experience - the taste, the texture, the satisfaction of knowing you did it yourself.
Yeah, when I read the comment about calories I thought "This is a prime example when engineers only think about numbers and completely miss the forest for the trees (err, mushrooms)"
Also, for many mushrooms, the risk of consuming a toxic variety is extremely low if you know what you're doing. People love to bring up examples of "But the head of the Mycological Society of XYZ died of misidentified mushrooms!!", but a while back I dug into those examples and found 0 evidence for any of them - they're just popular Internet old wives' tales that people love to regurgitate.
A high percentage of fatal poisonings in the US have been Southeast Asian immigrants because, in the button stage, the North American death cap looks nearly identical to the paddy straw mushroom they know from home.
You can say that to any mildly dangerous hobby
How many people in the US do you think actually forage wild plants and fungi?
The number of hospitalizations is somewhere around 10k a year. For ~1500 of those it's at least life threatening. ~100ish end up with organ failure or permanent neurological problems. ~10 of them die. That's every year.
That might be mildly dangerous compared to other hobbies, but if you isolate for actual practitioners of the hobby, suddenly those numbers look extremely dangerous.
Where are you getting your data? Is this a specific country/worldwide/what? If you're just talking about the US, a quick Google search shows your numbers are off by a few orders of magnitude. This article from the CDC estimated 100 hospitalizations for mushrooms in the US in 2016: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010a1.htm
Foraging for mushrooms is not dangerous if you know what you're doing and stick to easily identified mushrooms that aren't easily confused with poisonous varieties.
AAPCC annual reports, linked to from an actual mushroom foraging guide.
Also I said plants and mushrooms. Not specifically mushrooms. AAPCC doesn't track mushrooms separately and I would consider the CDC to not be the authority on poisoning -- their specialty is diseases.
Here's the relevant section from the 2023 National Poison Data System:
https://i.imgur.com/vIXenG8.png
8294 case mentions, 3039 hospitalizations.
for outcomes check the table.
Huh, that is quite interesting, thank you.
Looks like that includes the hallucinogenic mushrooms, which leads to 2139 case mentions and 1146 hospitalizations a year.
Eating plants at random must be more dangerous than eating mushrooms. I have heard that there are far more poisonous plants than fungi, and greens have almost no calories.
do you only eat the food with the highest calories:risk ratio?
Risk of death is a huge cost/downside. I've known several people poor enough to optimize all of their eating around cost per calorie. 30-50 calories is basically only worth your consideration if it's free at that point. If that came with a high risk of illness/death it's not even worth considering.
Ironically, optimizing around cost per calorie is, at least in most places in the US, a great way to have horrible health and die an early death.
A lot of the cost per calorie is in preparation; if you can cook your own meals, you can reduce your cost per calorie signficantly. The problem is a lot of people don't have the time (or maybe will-power) to cook every meal; a few of my previous jobs made it very difficult to cook my own meals, so I ate fast-food alot, and gained a lot of weight.
When your boss starts pushing Return To Office, ask if the company has a worthwhile kitchen in the office; at least a burner and plenty of room in the refrigerator for ingredients; it should be feasible to cook breakfast and lunch, but also dinner, in case you need to work late.
Starve now or die later is not a difficult choice for most people.
"Starve now"? If you're talking about the US, get real.
Essentially nobody is starving in the US for lack of calories (unless it's a case of mental illness or something similar). In fact, in the US, usually the opposite is true. From the Wikipedia page on food insecurity in the US:
> Reliance on food banks has led to a rise in obesity and diabetes within the food insecure community. Many foods in food banks are highly processed and low in nutritional value leading to further health effects. One study showed 33% of American households visiting food pantries had diabetes.
No its not. This is such a weird talking point completely divorced from reality. It's the complete opposite.
Meh, there are a couple of mushrooms that are super easy to identify with no risk of confusing them with anaything dangerous (at least where I live). Stick to those and you're fine. Also, they are super tasty ;)
Well then, what do you think about eating fugu?
I'm honestly amazed I didn't get tetrodotoxin poisoning when I was a kid. We used to play with these rough skinned newts all the time, they were everywhere, and nobody was especially diligent about washing their hands.
Same! I even kept a couple of them in a terrarium. And, my dad was a PhD in zoology, so it wasn't like I lacked access to expert advice. It was a "they have toxins on their skin, so... Eh, maybe wash your hands a bit", not "wash your hands or the whole family dies" level of concern.
Makes me wonder if a) these toxicity stories are exaggerated, b) it's really regionally specific, c) toxicity has radically increased in the past ~40 years since I was playing with newts, or d) we got dumb lucky.
I loved this article. I didn't know anything about the newt / snake interaction; I wonder if my dad did.
